Sunday, December 02, 2007

The Greatest Indie Rock Albums Ever

Blender has a list of the 100 greatest indie rock albums ever. This should start a few arguments. I agree with the top three, but would place them in a different order. (The Replacements' Let It Be is the greatest album ever. I won's entertain any arguments that say otherwise!) Start here with albums 100-91 and follow the countdown in increments of ten.

4 comments:

Lists are good for drunken conversation. Some of the bands further down on the list could easily be my number 1. The Pixies, Wilco, My Bloody Valentine...

I wish I could listen to every song from every album on that list all at once, take it in in all its fullness, while I'm drinking a beer at Hungry Chuck's (Syracuse) the first college bar that I ever gave a shit about...

I like Pavement at #1, but certainly a case can be made for any of the top 3. I don't like that Fugazi's first appearance is at #45 and behind bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes (I like both, but c'mon, this is Fugazi we're talking about!) or that Modest Mouse (although they chose the right album) is at only #41 or that Pinback didn't even make the list. Built to Spill should rank higher than #58 and if they're going to include groundbreaking punk bands like Black Flag, Bad Brains, The Descendents, The Misfits and The Dead Kennedys, where the hell is Minor Threat!? Lastly, I can't believe Cosigner didn't make the list. Otherwise, it's a nice primer on some great indie albums.

Well, lots of fun to read that piece, but here I go: galaxy 500 and the vaselines should have been higher, they were bunched along with the likes of Daniel Johnston, who is great but surely isn't indy rock, and neither is nick drake if we go by bender's own rules, the last 25 years.

I have a hard time with only one Mats album in the top 100. I love Pavement, and knew they'd have a top slot, and have no issue with that, though I'd probably have slanted at, say, #3. The list might be a bit too presentist. I've no argument with Daniel Johnston on the list -- I think he fits the category of indie rock if you define it broadly. Indie rock at this point has no connection to labels as much as to ethos. I also see 25 years as arbitrary, so I'm ok with Nick Drake, though 95% of the people reading that list only know him from the Volkswagon commercial.